This is kind of a few questions in one... so anyone who reads all of this, I owe you a beer.
I originally installed Hyperion Alpha years ago on a Pi Zero. It seemed to work pretty well and I didn't notice any lag between the display changing and the LED's changing. Or at least if there was, I was able to easily tweak it by reducing the capture resolution in hyperion so something REALLY low.
A little while ago I realized that I hadn't touched it in a while so I decided to update it. That was a bit of a mistake because that brought 2 problems. The first was that it wouldn't start automatically and the directly connected WS2812 LED's didn't work, which I fixed by creating the service and running it as root.
The second was that I now had a noticeable delay between the scene change and the LED color change. I went back to the same resolution setting but it's already set very low. So I've just been living with the delay.
I thought that maybe the problem was with the original Pi Zero being too slow to handle the image processing real time. I'd been wanting to upgrade to a Pi Zero 2 but obviously, supply is short.
I recently found a video showcasing the "Mango Pi MQ Quad" as a good alternative to the Pi Zero 2. It's the same form factor, has USB C instead of Micro USB, and actually has a faster processor and more RAM than the Zero 2. Plus it was only $38 from Aliexpress with a nice all-metal heat sync case.
Because it's not a true raspberry pi, HyperBian wouldn't boot at all on it. So I had to use the vendor provided Debian build, and just do the Hyperion install scripts for Debian.
It all worked GREAT, except I got a hardware error with the WS2812. After looking that up, I found that the library for WS2812 may not be compatible with 64bit OS's due to a bug. And it was suggested that I use WLED for my connection to the strip instead.
I do have a few extra NodeMCU ESP8266's from a different project (since they come in packs).
So my main question is that I COULD do this but I'm worried that WLED would introduce its own delay because of the latency of sending the color change via WIFI. And what if I have issues with my home wifi - could functionality be intermittent because of this? Is this a valid concern? Or is there a way to hardwire the Pi directly to the esp8266 to cut out wifi as a variable?
And just out of curiosity, had anyone else set this up on a MangoPi or some other hardware variant? Or have a fix for the 64bit OS ws2812 library problem?
Thanks to anyone who read all of that.